Marketing Doctoral Student Morgan Ward
In this internship Lori, my IE Pre-Grad mentee, and I worked on a project that I was just starting with a professor from another school. Lori and I started out by reading some of the relevant extant literature and discussing the major issues that are germane to this particular project. Lori was immediately very interested and offered many insights on what she thought may be the mechanisms underlying the effect we are examining.
Lori and I met almost every week to discuss the project and outside of these 1 hour discussions she also did a lot of the work to collect the data. The next few weeks were spent gathering data and Lori was instrumental in this process. She recruited personal friends to enter their data into online questionnaires. After this project, she also went to the Fashion School (on campus) and personally gathered data at a student organization meeting. I was so happy with all of the work and effort she put forth on gathering the data on multiple occasions (always the most arduous part of the research process).
After gathering the data, Lori also entered much of the data into spreadsheets for analysis. She has great attention to detail and I was grateful of how much care she took in getting things right.
Finally, Lori and I spent some time thinking about the results we found and what they meant and how we would proceed in the future. As my co-author and I wrote up our results, Lori read the short paper we put together and gave us some good constructive criticism which we valued very much.
In sum, Lori has been involved in the entire research process and her tireless effort and enthusiasm have been indispensable. My only regret is that the program isn't LONGER. I loved having her work with me.
I've told Lori that I hope she considers a future in academia - I think she has both the aptitude and the commitment to be a great PhD student in the future.